Carl Malamud writes, "On May 16, Boing Boing brought us the story of five years of intimidation on the Uniform System of Citaiton required in the United States, a system otherwise known as The Bluebook.

Based on your story, a stern keep off the grass warning was dispatched from the ever-growing Bluebook Legal Task Force at the eminent white shoe firm of Ropes & Gray."

Parker Higgins: "Every mention of the word 'cloud' from the hour-long Supreme Court oral arguments in ABC v. Aereo on April 22, 2014. Video is Cory Arcangel's "Super Mario Clouds" (2002)." More info. [Thanks, Joe Sabia!]

On "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver," a new HBO show starring the former Daily Show contributor, an interview with General Keith Alexander. There are a number of really weird and interesting thing about this interview with the former head of the US National Security Administration, one of which is that it was a hell of a lot more hard-hitting than an earlier interview with Alexander by "60 Minutes." — Read the rest

The good news is that Getty Images is to allow free-of-charge use of many images. The bad news is that you have to use official embed code, inserting an iframe whose contents they maintain control over. The EFF's Parker Higgins points out that, just as with YouTube, Facebook, Google, and other third-party embedded services, the image is watching you, too:

These concerns might be mitigated by a strong privacy policy or some indication of what Getty intends to log and how it's going to use it.

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Remember when Rep. Mike Rogers likened opponents of pernicious cybersecurity legislation to 14-year-olds? It turns out that middle-school-age students are also well-prepared to debate him on the NSA's programs as well.

EFF congratulates students from two middle schools who took home top prizes in the C-SPAN StudentCam 2014 competition for young filmmakers with their documentaries on the debate over mass surveillance."

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, "I escort a lot of TV crews in and out of the building at EFF. Few have been as efficient and polite as Ben Blum, a 13-year-old San Francisco independent YouTube producer who interviewed EFF's Parker Higgins for this short documentary. — Read the rest

It's been a year since Aaron Swartz killed himself. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Parker Higgins has posted a memorial to him that I found quite moving. I miss Aaron a lot.

I've been feeling pretty hopeless about the future lately, and I think a lot of it has been driven by the impending anniversary of Aaron's death. — Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has new analysis of the leaked Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty, a secretive trade deal being hammered out without any public oversight, and set to be fast-tracked through the US Congress without substantial debate. EFF's piece focuses on the treaty's provisions that affect "termination rights," an obscure but important part of copyright law that allows creators to take their assigned copyrights back from the companies who bought them after 35 years. — Read the rest

Adrian Chen at Gawker: "Alexey Kouznetsov is a 30-something Russian web developer. He looks not unlike a scrawnier Mark Zuckerberg." And he's the guy behind the popular weird Twitter account @horse_ebooks, which this blog first slow-clapped in January 2012. — Read the rest

Hugh sez, "EFF'r Parker Higgins tells me this sign was at a rally he spoke at in Berlin recently."

Grumpy Cat builds a GNU Internet [Frerk Meyer/CC BY-SA]

(Thanks, Hugh!)

EFF is celebrating the new inductees into its Takedown Hall of Shame with a new cooking show! In this episode, EFF staffer Parker Higgins bakes a "Mean Spirited Censorship Pie" — which is what all have to call the classic Southern dessert formerly known as "Derby Pie," now that Kern's Kitchen in Louisville is threatening to sue anyone who posts a family recipe with that name. — Read the rest

Some of America's worst copyright laws were passed through a profoundly undemocratic process called "policy laundering." This is what happens when an administration can't get Congress to pass a bad copyright law, so the US Trade Representative instead signs the US up to international treaties requiring America to pass the unpopular law. — Read the rest

Yesterday, I wrote about the Supreme Court's hearting for Kirtsaeng v. Wiley, which threatens to undermine the very nature of property itself, taking away your right to sell, modify, loan and give away any foreign-made object that has embodies one or more copyrights. — Read the rest

On the EFF's Deep Links blog, Parker Higgins presents the stakes in today's Supreme Court hearing for Kirtsaeng v. Wiley, which concerns the right of a student, Supap Kirtsaeng, to import textbooks from overseas and sell them in the USA. — Read the rest

On Wired, Geeta Dayal looks at the state of automated copyright enforcement video-bots, the mindless systems that shut down the Hugo awards livestream, took down NASA's own footage of the Curiosity landing, and interrupted the video from the DNC. Dayal examines the legal status and necessity for these bots (dubious); their ability to model copyright's full suite, including fair use (nonexistent); and the business reasons for deploying them (cowardly). — Read the rest

Boing Boing reader Parker Higgins shares this photograph, and explains:

I took this picture of a nyan cat sticker on the map of the San Francisco bay area public transit system, BART. The cat's right where all four colored lines go over the Bay Bridge, so it takes advantage of the map's implied rainbow.